Vice President JD Vance took the stage at the Munich Security Conference on Friday to dismiss fears of Russia meddling in Romania's elections—a move critics blasted as hypocritical, given his baseless claims of U.S. election fraud and support for Elon Musk, whose X has become a pro-Trump powerhouse.
"We're at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors," Vance said. "Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections, but I'd ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it's wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage even, but if your democracy can be destroyed with a few $100,000 of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with."
